HEEDS - Additional Information

What is HEEDS?

HEEDS (Hierarchical Evolutionary Engineering Design System) is an optimization software package that allows designers to automatically and concurrently explore hundreds of design parameters and their relationships in product and process design scenarios, and intelligently seeks optimal values for parameters that affect performance and cost.

HEEDS can be used to improve any engineering system (structural, thermal, fluid, electrical, etc.), including multi-disciplinary problems. In structural design applications, for example, HEEDS can evolve designs that simultaneously satisfy objectives and targets for stiffness, durability, crashworthiness, noise and vibration, mass, cost, manufacturability and reliability.

HEEDS applies several optimization methods simultaneously, allowing each method to take advantage of the best attributes and solutions found from other parallel searches. The multiple semi-independent search processes exchange information about the solution space with each other, helping them jointly to satisfy multiple constraints and objectives. This search method is called a heterogeneous multi-agent approach. It quickly identifies design attributes with good potential and uses them to focus, improve and accelerate the search for an optimum solution.